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"Pichai highlights the fact a typical Android user will “install around 50 apps themselves” and can easily remove preinstalled apps." You cannot remove the pre
by sourcesmith 8y ago
"Pichai highlights the fact a typical Android user will “install around 50 apps themselves” and can easily remove preinstalled apps."
You cannot remove the pre-installed apps, in my experience, only the subsequent updates to those apps.
- mehrdadn 8y agoYeah, I'd say this is wrong. His direct quote is [1]: > Today, because of Android, a typical phone comes preloaded with as many as 40 apps from multiple developers, not just the company you bought the phone from. If you prefer other apps—or browsers, or search engines—to the preloaded ones, you can easily disable or delete them, and choose other apps instead, including apps made by some of the 1.6 million Europeans who make a living as app developers. "Easily disable or delete"? Not to mention the lack of deletion on a lot of these (...any? I don't recall if I've seen any with deletion), I don't always even find a hard way to disable or delete preinstalled apps on phones... unless we're talking about booting custom bootloaders and wiping your phone etc. [1] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/android-has-created-more-choice-not-less/ https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/andro...
- kevindqc 8y agoDon't you just need to long press the app icon and choose disable/delete?
- enriquto 8y agoyes, but you cannot delete the google apps such as chrome or gmail (the option is not "enabled")
- digi_owl 8y agoThankfully those are most often bundled as stubs that take barely any space. roll back the updates and then disable. Did that to Chrome for the longest time as i was using Firefox on my Android device (before Mozilla went nuts. Now i am flipflopping between Opera and Brave, while waiting for Vivaldi to get a mobile version).
- mehrdadn 8y agoKeep in mind that (a) if the fact that you have to roll back updates is not obvious to people here, I'm not sure how a normal user is supposed to find it "easy", and (b) if you have to roll it back too, you'd lose your data in that app, so it's neither as consequence-free as disabling, nor as thorough as deleting (freeing all the space etc.).
- kllrnohj 8y agoSimply hitting "disable" warns you that it will uninstall updates & delete user data. It's literally a single button press to get back 100% of the space possible, and it's the button called "disable" right in front at the top of the app's info section.
- enriquto 8y agoIt's infuriatingly confusing and it's not clear that you will get back 100% of the space. If they are sincere about this, why cannot you simply fucking uninstall the damn application ? No stub, no nothing. Just a normal app like the others, that you can install or not.
- kllrnohj 8y agoBecause it's on the system partition which is fixed size and read-only. That's how factory reset works, by nuking the data partition. They probably should just lie and rename the button to uninstall. That's basically what it is.
- vetinari 8y agoYou can disable both. (I have Chrome disabled, because I like Firefox more).
- kllrnohj 8y agoYes, you can. Both gmail & chrome have working disable buttons. At least they do on a Pixel 2.
- mehrdadn 8y agoFor the ones that allow you to, yeah. But how would you e.g. easily disable/delete Google Play Services (say, if you didn't want Google on your phone)? The disable option is disabled. Also, even when I try disabling some of these built-in Google apps that I supposedly can disable, I get a prompt warning me that "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave"... you can't keep a straight face telling a user "oh but you can easily disable this!" when you yourself are telling them the consequence is that it might break other things on their phone. (!)
- testvox 8y agoThey just mean apps that use Google play services will be broken. I don't think that's unreasonable. it seems you want it both ways, you want the ability to remove or disable Google play services, without losing access to them.
- gmiller123456 8y agoA lot of built in apps do not offer services to other apps, but they still display the same message. Google Play Services is the exceptional case.
- russdpale 8y agoSome apps can't be disabled. The t-mobile application for instance.
- ionised 8y agoSome of them simply reactivate/redownload themselves every time you do this. You basically have to root the phone to remove a lot of the Google/vendor bloatware.
- nine_k 8y agoYou sure can disable preinstalled apps. Gear icon -> Apps -> select a preinstalled app, you have options to "Disable" and to "Force stop" the app. What you can't is to remove the app and reclaim the storage it's taking. At least so it looks on an un-rooted Sony phone running Android 7.0 that I have before me.
- Klathmon 8y agoMany preinstalled apps that aren't essential are just a stub, a few kb that points to the app store to be downloaded on first boot. When these are "disabled" all that remains on the device is a pointer to the app store in a disabled state. It's a few KB of data, and in my opinion a fantastic trade-off to actually allowing deletion then not being able to "factory reset" since that data is no longer on the device.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago"Many preinstalled apps that aren't essential are just a stub" I've never seen this. Just about every preinstalled app on the phones I've had are the actual app.
- Tijdreiziger 8y agoI bought a Samsung Galaxy S9 a few days back. The preinstalled Facebook app (which I immediately disabled) has a listed version of 'stub (23.1.1)', and it's only 127 kB large.
- StudentStuff 8y agoThis is definitely not the case on any Android I've recently worked with, disabling Facebook, Google Play Games, Google Newsstand, etc all just delete the user data and supposedly disable the app. I hate that this shovelware is on my phone in any form, and it makes me regret buying a non-ROMmable phone in the first place.
- Klathmon 8y ago
- ivanhoe 8y agoNot just that you can't truly uninstall them without rooting the phone, but on my last android phone you couldn't even move Google's apps to the SD card to at least save some space.
- ge0rg 8y agoThe original post by Pichai is more carefully worded as "you can easily disable or delete them", so it's an inaccurate summary by theverge.
- smt88 8y agoNeither is true. You can't delete most, and you can't disable some of the others, either.
- vamc19 8y agoOn my Pixel 2, the only apps I can't disable are Settings, Phone, Messages, SIM toolkit, Pixel Launcher and Play Services. I can disable (not uninstall) rest of the Google apps that were pre-installed.
- thisisit 8y agoAnd Play services ties everything back to Google doesn't it? In which case the claim is still untrue.
- Anon1096 8y agoPlay services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader)
- mehrdadn 8y ago> Play services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader) Isn't that literally the point? When the complaint is that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving few viable alternative options, the fact that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving fewer alternative options is more like an admission rather than a defense...
- yread 8y agoI've read somewhere that typical smartphone user installs 15 apps. I certainly can't imagine my grandma installing anywhere close to 50 apps
- chomp 8y agoI don't know, I have 106 installed on my iPhone. I know a lot of people who are packrats and install way more. I could see 50 per user.
- dest 8y agoMaybe you have 15 apps at a given time, but you install 50 apps during the smartphone's lifetime.
- disgruntledphd2 8y agoNah, the mean is probably 50 while the median is 15. This crops up a lot with counts.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoIt creeps up very quickly once you start installing site-wrapper apps. I consciously try to avoid those, but even a quick audit of my apps shows I have at least a few: - Youtube - Hacker News - Reddit - XDA-Developers - Amazon - My banking app Pretty much all of those could just be a tab in my browser, but the convenience of properly-formatted text, easy searching, replying, etc pulls one towards the native app.
- nevir 8y agoThey can't be removed from disk, but can be fully disabled
- corrigible 8y agoIn many cases, they cannot be disabled at all.
- flyinghamster 8y agoOr else, you get a gripe that (depending on the app and whether or not others depend on it) may or may not be a dark pattern: "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave. Your data will also be deleted."
- smt88 8y agoA typical person installing 50 apps themselves is utter nonsense also. I know zero people who have done this, and it would be utterly opposite iOS behavior (where most people install 0-1 apps per month). Maybe there are bots who install and then uninstall many apps. Those used to be fairly prevalent.
- zeveb 8y ago> A typical person installing 50 apps themselves is utter nonsense also. I know zero people who have done this, and it would be utterly opposite iOS behavior (where most people install 0-1 apps per month). I just counted, and I have 128 apps on my Android phone (none are games). Some of those were pre-installed, but I installed the vast majority of them. It wouldn't surprise me if this is something where iOS & Android users are opposite one another: iPhones are smart phones, whereas Android phones are computers with calling capabilities. The whole point of iOS is to communicate; the whole point of Android is to be a computer which fits in your pocket.
- smt88 8y agoThat makes sense to me for power users and people who are tech savvy, but most Android users are neither. I believe there are a billion of them now.
- zeveb 8y agoI'd love to know why at least three folks downvoted my comment. The original poster stated that he knows zero people who have installed 50 apps, so I offered myself up as an example of someone who's done so, and gone on to install more. Do people think I'm lying? Did they object to my thought on iOS versus Android? Why? Do they think that an iPhone is a computer with calling capabilities? Do they think that Android phones are smart phones? I'd really like to know what offended folks so much that three folks (at least) downvoted, and offended them so much they didn't even bother posting. I'm not complaining about the downvotes, just genuinely curious what could possibly have been controversial.
- dontnotice 8y agoYou cannot remove system apps they're part of the OS, the other preinstalled apps come curtsy of OEMs and carriers. You can change defaults and sideload apps on android, which makes it much more permissible than the rest of maker i.e iOS.
- digi_owl 8y agoOEMs and carriers often put "their" (the Facebook app bundled on some Samsung phones can't be deleted, only disabled) apps on the system side of the fence...
- mrtksn 8y agoYes but that wouldn't sound well on a press release.
- mrtksn 8y agoOK, apparently the Verge summary wasn't perfect
- Anon1096 8y agoIf you allow a user to delete an app entirely like Chrome, then what do you do if they decide to factory reset their phone? The whole point of disabling instead of deleting is that it for all intents and purposes isn't there, but if a user factory resets they aren't screwed without a web browser or map application.
- mehrdadn 8y ago> If you allow a user to delete an app entirely like Chrome, then what do you do if they decide to factory reset their phone? The whole point of disabling instead of deleting is that it for all intents and purposes isn't there, but if a user factory resets they aren't screwed without a web browser or map application. You could remove the app from the system while keeping it in the restoration image. Same way as how you can uninstall PC crapware when you buy a new one but it's still in the image in the recovery partition should you choose to factory reset.
- Klathmon 8y agoThat's literally what disabling it does, that's why there is a step titled "uninstalling updates" as the updated versions are installed on the user partition, but the preinstalled version is on a (mostly read only) system partition. Removing that app from the system partition won't give you more usable space without repartitioning, and it will now mean that you can't factory reset the phone.
- effingwewt 8y agoThe solution is what ROMs do since cyanogen was taken to task by google for bundling google apps with his ROMs. They let you download the google apps you want, or none. If they allowed clean installs for stock google images and the customer could choose which Google services/apps to install factory resets wouldn't be an issue.
- mehrdadn 8y agoNo, it's not the same thing. The whole point of a recovery image is that there is never a need to write to it in order to be able to fully use the system itself -- otherwise you'd 'contaminate' the recover image and your "factory reset" stops being what it literally says: a factory reset. And indeed, /system has this problem, as there are clearly cases (like when rooting) when you have to write to the /system partition for reasons that are very much not "because I want to change what happens upon a factory reset".